While other sports clearly are not as wonderful as football, they have their place, and reviewing their old equipment reminds us that football was not the only sport to use archaic, oddball goods. Below are some favorites on sale 116 years ago.

The relatively new sport of basketball had balls with laces and nets with bottoms. Just like footballs of the time, basketballs had to be unlaced to be reinflated, and each new basketball was shipped uninflated, requiring the user to lace it themselves using the supplied needle.

Likewise, basketball shoes came with either treads or suction cups on the soles, while the pants were padded

Spalding did not ignore the needs of American women, since they offered a line of scientifically designed gymnasium suits featuring bloomers that were “large and full,” which was just what a girl needed in those days.

When advertising school pennants and flags, Spalding opted to include examples for major Eastern and Midwestern programs, including the usual cast of characters: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Michigan, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and, of course, Oberlin.

Just as ski shoes and skis are separate items, so were ice skating shoes and blades. Also notice on the left-hand page that the ice skate blade guards were called scabbards.

As we know, pole vaulting can be dangerous today with their fiberglass and carbon fiber poles, but the poles of 1910 had two notable differences. First, they were bamboo, and second, they had steel points at the planting end, one of which looked like the world’s largest hypodermic needle.

Want to know who put the dumb in dumb bells? I’m thinking it was Eugen Sandow, who patented dumb bells that improved your grip and your strength.

Last, and certainly not least, was their home gym equipment. You might think that home gyms are a new thing, but those aspiring to physical fitness in 1910 could just do it by slapping down $24 to $99 in gold-backed currency and quickly achieve an Adonis-like physique.

That’s it for now.

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I’ve spent a lot of time researching football played by active-duty military teams over the years. It started with the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowl teams (1, 2, 3, 4). Another big effort came for the West Point Cavalry Detachment teams of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which included the earliest all-Black team known to have won a championship in an otherwise all-White football league. I’ve documented lots of other stories of military football, including the East Coast President’s Cup and the West Coast Armistice Day games.

So, I took immediate interest in an undated Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) on eBay showing a football team practicing on the battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma’s main deck, port side. It’s not every day one finds such an image, so I bought it, figuring I’d research the team’s history, find an interesting anecdote or two, and tell the tale here, which I have done (or am doing).

Things took a bit of a turn when the seller informed me that the RPPC came from her grandfather’s collection, as he served on the Oklahoma during WWI and perhaps later, after reenlisting.

Family histories fade with time, so it was unclear whether Tromp played on the battleship team. However, I found no information about him playing in his hometown, Omaha, so I suspect he also didn’t play for the Oklahoma.

One family story the newspapers corroborated was that while serving on the Oklahoma, Tromp received a sweater through the Red Cross that was knitted by a young lady from New York. After the war, the two met, married, and the union eventually resulted in their granddaughter, who today is dispersing an RPPC collection documenting Tromp’s time aboard the Oklahoma.

Commissioned in 1916 as America’s first oil-burning battleship, the Oklahoma served in the Atlantic through WWI, providing convoy support, including escorting President Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, when he became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Europe.

In 1922, the Oklahoma transferred to the Pacific, where it remains today, at the bottom, after it sank, for the second time.

Naval ships commonly had football teams in those days, and with 860+ sailors aboard, the Oklahoma had the numbers to field a fair team. Battleship teams mostly played other battleships when in port, but they also played college, semi-pro, and town teams.

I did not find documentation of the Oklahoma’s football team playing before 1922, but surely they did, even if intramurally. In 1922, they played numerous games against other battleships at Trona Field, in Los Angeles-San Pedro harbor.

They also played in 1924, though they were not contenders for the fleet championship. Despite not being competitive with other battleship teams, they opened the 1925 season against the University of Washington in a doubleheader when the Huskies faced the sailors before dealing with the West Seattle Athletic Club in the nightcap.

Washington, playing with a split squad, dominated both games, though it’s worth noting that the Huskies went undefeated that season until Alabama beat them 20-19 in the 1926 Rose Bowl.

The Oklahoma played college teams in the early 1930s, including two games with Whittier College during the years Richard Nixon was a reserve for the Poets. A game with Pacific Lutheran rounded out their games against the academically inclined.

The next time that the Oklahoma and football intersect came the morning of the 1941 Pacific Fleet football championship game. The Oklahoma team was not among the championship contenders. Instead, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania and Arizona were slated to play for the title at 1:00 PM on December 7, 1941.

The Pennsylvania was in dry dock, slightly removed from Battleship Row, from which the Keystoner team planned to leave for the game at 8:00 AM. One player, Mickey Ganitch, stood topside in his football gear, ready to leave when the first wave of Japanese airplanes arrived at 7:55. His battle stations position was up in the crow’s nest, so he climbed up in his football gear and spent the next few hours directing anti-aircraft fire.

A bomb hit the Pennsylvania, penetrating a level or two before exploding, killing others but saving Ganitch’s life. Despite the damage, the ship returned to service quickly, as did five other damaged battleships over the next year or two, including two that sank that day.

As we all know, a bomb penetrated the Arizona’s powder magazine, causing a massive explosion. It has rested in place ever since.

At least 5 torpedoes hit the Oklahoma before it capsized, leading to 429 Oklahoma sailors, or half its complement, being among the 2,403 killed in the attack.

They raised the outdated Sooner in 1943, but it never returned to service. In 1947, while being towed to San Francisco for scrapping, it sank in a storm 500 miles from Hawaii.

Below are additional U.S.S. Oklahoma RPPCs from Basil Tromp’s collection during his time serving aboard.

As noted at the beginning, telling a story based on an old RPPC is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss Oklahoma’s 1970 football staff, as talented a crew as you will find, but many were ethically challenged.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Shoulder pads came along in 1895, apparently at Yale; at least the Elis were the first documented users. Their shoulder pads were custom or homemade, stuffed leather or cloth pads, sewn on the exterior of players’ jerseys.

Sporting goods manufacturers, who were close with the top teams, picked up on the trend and introduced commercially available shoulder pads that mirrored the homemade versions: simple stuffed pads sewn atop the jersey.

Although many teams and players wore the fancy leather pads from Spalding and their competitors, those with fewer resources rolled their own.

While the early pads typically sat atop the shoulders, they soon added protective caps over the bursa and extended the padding to cover the collarbones. As those changes occurred, shoulder pads evolved into integrated units connecting the left, right, and middle, and began taking the shape resembling shoulder pads today.

An element of shoulder pad use that seems strange today is that early wearers of the integrated units did not always wear their shoulder pads under their jerseys. Some wore them atop the jersey.

When teams began covering their shoulder pads can be difficult to determine since, relative to the monster shoulder pads that came later, early integrated units were small and thin. Their size and the quality of game action images often make it difficult to tell whether a team or player wore shoulder pads under their jerseys.

You might think that those who wore their shoulder pads over their jerseys were uninformed rubes, the sort whose great-grandsons wore jorts or capris pants. I thought the same until I looked at the 1910 Spalding Fall and Winter catalog. The cover has an illustration of two teams in a game in which it is unclear whether either team wears shoulder pads.

Inside the issue, however, Spalding makes it clear that wearing shoulder pads atop the jerseys is perfectly acceptable, perhaps even recommended.

The integrated shoulder pads worn atop the jersey styling did not last long, and neither did Spalding’s 1914 shoulder pads, which had prominent bumps at key locations.

Instead, shoulder pads were soon smoothed out and universally worn under the jerseys. Presumably, wearing the jersey over the shoulder pads was more aesthetically pleasing than wearing them atop the jersey. Also, wearing them under the jersey made the shoulder pads more difficult to grab, a tactic we saw with horse collar tackles that resulted in penalties as of 2008.

So, a simple issue like whether the jersey should cover one’s shoulder pads took a few years to institutionalize, but doing so cleared the way for the many shoulder stripes that football welcomed in the 1930s, which were a bit much.

Still, the early shoulder stripes ultimately led to the signature striping that UCLA, LSU, and other teams adopted a few decades later, which has been a good thing.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the evolution of football’s rules for how referees spot the ball, which hung on the question of whether to rotate or not to rotate.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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• Lafayette Cup

• Albert Russel Erksine Trophy

• Eugene C. Bonniwell Trophy

I also wrote about the days before conferences played full schedules. Teams played varying numbers of conference games, so they decided conference championships based on each team’s conference win percentage, excluding ties. (The NFL followed the same procedure through the 1932 season.)

Today, those separate streams merge in the story of the Edgar B. Schwabacher Perpetual Trophy, which originated in 1921, when its namesake donated it to be awarded to the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) football champion.

The Schwabachers were a trophy-donating family. The Sam I. Schwabacher Challenge Trophy arrived in 1911 as the traveling award for the West Coast crew championship. Funnily enough, Stanford won the trophy in 1916, dropped the sport after that season, and chose not to pass it on to the next winner.

The Edgar B. Schwabacher Trophy was also a traveling or perpetual trophy. It is a wonderful period design, two statuettes: one is a placekicker, and the other is a holder, lying on the ground holding the ball using the over-under technique, plus there were small, football-shaped engraving plates to list each year’s winners.

Cal won the title and trophy for the first several years; Stanford and Cal shared it in 1924, so each school had the trophy for six months. Washington earned it in 1925 and Stanford in 1926.

Things got interesting in 1927 when Stanford, USC, and Idaho tied for the conference championship, with Stanford and USC winning four conference games and tying one, while Idaho won two and tied two, giving all three teams a perfect record since ties did not count in the calculation. Nevertheless, there was controversy since Idaho’s wins came over Washington State and Oregon, who combined for one conference win.

The controversy ended at the conference meeting when the members voted Idaho an equal share, but they also discussed moving to a round-robin conference schedule, a step they never took.

Thankfully, Idaho got to hold the trophy for four months following its title win.

USC won the title in 1928, while 1929 saw a four-way tie among 6-1 USC, 5-1 Stanford, and 4-1 Cal and Oregon.

By some accounts, the four-way tie and the schools’ inability to agree to round-robin scheduling led them to stop naming a conference champion and to return the trophy to the donor. (Sources commonly cite conference winners, including those who tied, through the 1958 season.) Whatever the truth of the story, Washington State proudly accepted the trophy in January 1931, but the trophy is absent from media reports thereafter, aside from occasional retrospective stories.

Whether the trophy gathers dust in a Washington State basement, was returned to the donor, or became a boat anchor, it disappeared from view; we shall not look upon its like again.

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Four died in action in France, and many others were wounded. Over time, various team members saw action at Belleau Wood, Meuse-Argonne, the Banana Wars, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Korea. Of the 20+ who played for the 1917 Mare Island Marines, five became Marine Corps generals, and one, by happenstance, served with the 13th Marines in France, the same unit as my maternal grandfather.

Following the war, 18 played in the early NFL, and 6 became NFL head coaches; others coached college football, including George Halas, Paddy Driscoll, Roy Andrew, Jimmy Conzelman, Dick Hanley, Dick Romney, and Charlie Bachman. Of course, most team members were not so famous, living everyday lives.

I know what happened to most of them because I spent an inordinate amount of time tracing every one of the 178 men I identified as playing a part on one of the four teams. I had to track each man down because the book was meant to verify or disprove a 1969 claim by one of those Marine Corps generals that half the players in the 1918 Rose Bowl had died in service to their country.

I eventually proved his claim was untrue, but the only way to confirm it was false was to track every individual mentioned as practicing and playing with the teams, and sort out where they went. That was not an easy task. One of my first blog stories described the challenges of dealing with misinformation, misspellings, typos, and other errors that took me down incorrect paths.

Despite scouring military records, newspaper archives, genealogical sites, and college archives, I could not find some of the 178 guys, so I appealed to anyone who might have information on the remaining 11.

Periodically, I have looked for the remaining 11, but I didn’t find anything until now, leaving 10 to be identified.

Several times recently, when I encountered research brick walls, I turned to AI to help. I did so the other day with Hastings, and after numerous queries and dead ends, AI turned over a stone I had not. One thing led to another, and now I can tell the story of the guy named Hastings on Camp Lewis’ 1918 Rose Bowl team.

Back in 2017, I only knew Hastings’ surname and that he supposedly played football for Fresno High School, though most California high schools played rugby at the time. The records I had showed he did not appear in a game all season, yet suddenly, he was on the traveling squad for the Rose Bowl, so I half-assumed the name was a typo or some other error. Still, my 10-year-old notes show that I investigated a dozen guys named Hastings among the 30,000+ soldiers who trained with the 91st Division at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma.

One way or another, I or AI had a breakthrough and found an article listing the Camp Lewis team roster that provided Hastings’ first name:

Armed with his first name, I found Robert Roy Hastings’ WWI Draft Registration form from June 1917, showing he was born in Chicago, lived in Fresno, and was employed at the Preston School of Industry, a state reform school for boys, so he was a Central Valley guy.

My notes from 2017 show that I looked at him then, but could not find any links, so I moved on. Part of the challenge of tracking him down back then was confusion about his unit at Camp Lewis. The newspaper listed him as part of the 403rd Engineers, a group that did not exist, at least not by that name. In fact, he served with the 403rd Aero Squadron, which was formed at Camp Lewis in 1917 and was briefly known as the 403rd Aero Construction Squadron (Engineers). Rather than a group of flyboys in training, the 403rd was involved in logging efforts in the Northwest, since the area’s Sitka spruce produced the wood for WWI airplane frames.

Despite not playing a game all season, the record shows that Hastings traveled with the team to the Rose Bowl. While I have not found evidence that he played, he is listed on the injury report with a bad ankle.

Stories published a few years later indicate he played in the game -some said he starred in the game- and suffered a broken ankle or leg requiring a silver plate to stabilize the damage. The injury led to his discharge from the Army in early 1918.

Hastings shows up again in October 1918 as the coach at Pomona High, east of LA. Since many California high schools had played rugby since 1906 and were just getting back into football, Pomona was lucky to have a guy with his football background volunteer to assist the team. Newspapers covering his hiring reported that he played at Harvard and was an all-star in several sports. However, he quickly clarified, saying his football experience came from playing on Fresno-area town teams.

The Pomona High kids loved him; he soon became their paid head coach and led them in a season that extended into February, as numerous games were postponed due to Spanish Flu quarantines.

He married and had a little girl in Pomona in January 1921. There was a story or two about him briefly coaching Fresno State Normal’s football team in 1921, though I couldn’t corroborate it.

Then, seemingly out of thin air, Hastings gained all kinds of unwanted publicity in December 1921, when he traveled with a pilot named E. H. Tanner from Fresno to San Francisco, where a local newspaper promoted an airplane stunt show that described Hastings as the general manager of the Marina Flying Association.

On Saturday, December 4, 1921, Hastings got in the backseat of E. H. Tanner’s plane. After taking flight, the plane rose to 2,500 feet, at which point Hastings jumped from the plane.

When his parachute opened at 2,000 feet, 3,000 earthbound spectators saw a trapeze hanging beneath the canvas chute. The plan was for Hastings to strap both wrists to the trapeze and perform tricks while descending. However, witnesses saw Hastings hanging from the trapeze by only one arm, and as he reached with the other arm, his bound hand slipped from the strap. He fell, landing in the city, east of the Presidio, near Divisadero and Lombard Avenues.

It’s unclear where Hastings got his aviation background. The obituaries claimed he served with an aero squadron in San Diego, but he was at Camp Lewis in December 1917, broke his leg, and was discharged, so if he ever flew in the military, it was before he arrived at Camp Lewis. Perhaps he got involved in the aviation stunt game after the war. It’s anyone’s guess now, but we know it didn’t work out well in the end.

In death, Hastings joined those who perished during the war, and a Rose Bowl opponent, Marine aviator Dutch Molthen, whose plane crashed at Quantico in 1920. There was a Great Lakes player who died from football injuries in a 1919 college game, so while a few who died young, most of those who played for the four Rose Bowl teams lived good, long lives, at least for their day.

Now, after identifying Robert Hastings a decade after 168 others, Hastings becomes 169 of 178, so only 10 more to go. I’ll report back if future searches prove fruitful.

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Girls Will Be Girls

Lest you think that high school girls of 1914 were delicate little flowers, let’s consider the events following the Toledo Scott-Toledo Waite high school football game. Waite won the game, leading some of their coeds to celebrate on the field after the final gun sounded.

After taking offense, a sizable number of Scott girls went on the offensive, leading to pulled hair, missing ribbons, and a few knuckle sandwiches. The mail cheerleaders helped break things up, and while an investigation was promised, none occurred, at least based on the lack of follow-up in local newspapers.

Pinstripes in Football

A reader, J David Holt, recently asked whether football teams have worn pinstripes. Despite all the stripe variations that have appeared on the sleeves, shoulders, chests, pants, stockings, helmet, and shoes since football began, it was not until the 2018 Notre Dame team that someone in a position of authority thought it was a good idea to put pinstripes on a football uniform, for their Shamrock Series game at Yankee Stadium.

As seen below and in the YouTube video of the game, putting pinstripes on a football uniform was not a good idea.

Pinstripes have appeared on football practice fields in the past when various coaches wore them. Back in the day, coaches often wore football pants and other gear on the practice field. A few wore baseball pants, either because they coached baseball as well or found them comfortable.

Below are images of coaches rocking pinstripes on the gridiron.

Guards Back Formation

Mass and momentum plays ruled football from the late 1880s until 1905. American football did not yet require a certain number of offensive players on the line of scrimmage. Neither were there rules that kept players from being in motion at the snap or from running toward the line.

To take advantage of those rules, Penn’s coach, George Woodruff, devised the “guards back” formation shown below.

Positioning the guards in the backfield and the ends aligned at angles allowed all kinds of movements with several players leading the ball carrier through the hole and others pushing him from behind.

Rather than diagramming the play, as football coaches had begun to do, the newspaper boys illustrated how the players were positioned midway through a play. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but perhaps you can.

Mass and momentum play proved dangerous, leading to rule changes that:

• Allowed only three men in motion at the snap in 1894,

• Required seven players on the line of scrimmage in 1903,

• Prohibited pulling, lifting, carrying, pushing, or charging into the ball carrier to assist his forward progress in 1910.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss West Point’s Ralph W. Drury, who wore football’s first documented head harness. Largely unknown and previously unidentified, his contributions to football are now revealed.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Soccer and rugby are British games that formally split when rugby established its laws in 1871. American football split from rugby several years later with the founding of the Intercollegiate Football Association. While that happened in the distant past, watching World Cup games reminds us that the three games share common roots. Each is played in an enclosed space, with teams working to move the ball into their opponent’s territory, where they kick it under or over the crossbar.

Though commonalities remain, football has changed in both sudden steps and gradual ways. Adopting the system of downs in 1882 was a sudden step, fundamentally changing the game all at once. A more gradual process change was how football has punished fouls, as it evolved from rugby’s three simple fouls: awarding a free kick, loss of possession, and disqualification.

Football’s approach to penalties changed following the 1882 adoption of the system of downs, which gave teams possession of the ball for three downs, with an additional set of downs granted for gaining five or more yards. The system of downs increased the value of yardage and precision around yard lines.

Several years after adopting the system of downs, football was beset by complaints that the game was too rough. Harvard’s faculty threatened to ban the game unless rule changes eliminated rough play, a threat they carried through on during the 1885 season. Princeton’s faculty issued similar threats, though the Tigers continued to play.

After Harvard’s faculty announced its football ban in early 1885, a Harvard student committee recommended several rule changes related to officiating and fouls that, if enacted, would allow the resumption of play. Among their proposed changes were to:

• Change the officiating crew so the referee is responsible for managing the ball, and an umpire monitors the players, focusing on fouls.

• Have the referee make decisions without consulting captains or judges.

• Allow the referee to punish unsportsmanlike acts, such as piling on, not explicitly covered by the rules.

• Develop a system of graduated penalties, up to season-long disqualifications for striking with an open hand.

Meanwhile, Princeton argued for awarding points for certain fouls, including:

• A two-point penalty for violating Rule 28, which concerned throttling, hacking, tripping, and other forms of unnecessary roughness

• A one-point penalty and player disqualification for intentional delay of the game.

The IFA passed both rules at its February 1885 meeting, but changed the penalty for intentional delay of the game in October, so the offending player was disqualified and his team suffered a five-yard loss, making it football’s first distance penalty. I have not found documentation that the IFA revoked the two-point penalty; neither have I found examples of it being invoked in a game, so it was likely tossed out in October 1885 as well. (I have yet to locate copies of the 1885, 1886, and 1887 rule books, so I’m working from newspaper reports for this topic.)

Football’s continued violence led to other calls for change, but the IFA team captains were unwilling to make them, instead committing to encouraging their teams to play fairly.

We, the undersigned, captains of the intercollegiate football teams, hereby pledge ourselves to coach our teams to stop holding in touch line, slugging, and all other improper plays.

‘Football Rules Changed,’ New York Herald, March 27, 1887.

Later that year, the IFA turned most rulemaking, the assignment of game referees, and other major decision-making over to an alumni board headed by Walter Camp, marking the point at which the players effectively ceded control of the game to the adults in the room. The adults made the rules from then on.

The 1888 rule book noted that, unless otherwise noted, all offensive fouls resulted in a loss of a down, while defensive fouls resulted in a five-yard penalty, enough for a first down in most instances. One or two other fouls led to the loss of possession, and unnecessary roughness resulted in player disqualification, which was supposed to limit violence, but was not called often enough to do so.

Additional rule changes came in 1889, when they required the referee and umpire to use whistles, a tool whose volume had been greatly improved by England’s James Hudson’s invention of the Acme whistle in 1883, to indicate the cessation of play on fouls and downs. Presumably, the use of whistles reduced piling on and other fouls occurring after plays.

In addition, the rulemakers further graduated the penalties for foul acts. Players continued to be disqualified for unnecessary roughness, hacking, and striking with a closed fist, while throttling (choking), tripping up, and intentional tackling below the knees resulted in the offended team being given the choice of a 25-yard penalty or a free kick. The 25-yard penalty is also the point at which football introduced the half-the-distance concept for fouls committed near the offending team’s goal line.

In 1894, piling on warranted a fifteen-yard penalty, and offside play incurred a ten-yard step-off; these distances were later applied to other types of fouls.

Football instituted a two-yard penalty in 1906 for teams calling more than three timeouts per half.

Football added its only horizontal-distance penalty in 1913, which applied to punters who feinted a punt during the puntout. Since the punter executed the play from behind his opponent’s goal line, they had the offender move five yards further from the goal posts rather than applying a vertical distance penalty. Puntouts went away in 1920, and with it, the horizontal-distance penalty.

Since the 1920s, football’s rule book has expanded and now includes an almost uncountable number of fouls, most of which carry distance penalties. The 2026 NCAA Rule Book includes nine different types of penalties applied to a host of transgressions:

• 45 fouls lead to a five-yard penalty

• 15 fouls result in a ten-yard penalty

• 44 fouls call for a fifteen-yard penalty

• 10 offensive fouls lead to the loss of a down

• 1 foul (defensive pass interference) leads to the ball being spotted where the foul occurred

• 21 defensive fouls result in an automatic first down

• 6 fouls cause a charged timeout

• 9 fouls lead to player disqualification

• 1 foul, for unfair acts, gives the referee wide discretion over the penalty, including awarding points to the offended team.

Of course, the breadth of penalties and fouls is an attempt to make the punishment proportionate to the crime. Early football had few fouls and penalties, but the game’s increasingly complex, technical nature led to a wider range of them. Of football’s three original penalties -awarding a free kick, loss of possession, and disqualification- only disqualification survives, and it is most often applied today to targeting, likely the game’s most controversial penalty.

As has occurred on many occasions in the game’s history, attempts will be made to modify the rules, improve call accuracy, or revise penalties for certain fouls. Regardless, people will complain about the situation, just as they did in the 1880s. It’s just the nature of sports, and the judgment calls officials make when enforcing the rules.

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Last week, I published a story about shoe branding that included five images from the 1971 Wilson Fall and Winter catalog, one of which caught the eye of one of my two sons, who sent me the following message:

Really enjoyed the shoe branding tidbit from a few days ago. What was going on with that sawtooth cleat in the last image?

Here’s the image he referenced:

His question about a seemingly innocuous catalog item revealed my failure to convey a meaningful element of football’s past to him. Then, as I began researching the history of ripple shoes, I realized I was not alone in this failure, as my research showed how little documentation exists about this vital element of football history.

Ripple-soled shoes, or ripple shoes, should be recognized by anyone who played football or had gym class in the 1960s, 1970s, and parts of the 1980s. During that time, they were the quintessential coaching shoe, and game officials wore them as well. They symbolized coaching, so my failure came in not passing on to my son the thrill I felt when I landed my first paid coaching gig, which led me, nay, required me, to buy the finest pair of ripple shoes I could find. That is just what coaches did back then.

Ripple sole shoes were the brainchild of Nathan Hack, who led a Detroit-based shoe manufacturing company before retiring to Santa Monica. In SoCal, he continued tinkering and collaborated with former USC faculty member Laurence Morehouse to develop a boot suitable for paratroopers and those with leg wounds who needed extra cushioning. A patent emerged from the research, allowing Hack to sell his sole, or a license for the same, to many shoe companies.

Hack touted his ripple soles as the first innovation in shoes since Julius Caesar put heels on his Legionnaires’ sandals 2,000 years before, saying the ripples reduced shock by 40 percent and extended the wearer’s stride by pushing them forward. They pitched the shoes as ideal for postal workers, nurses, and others who spent much of the day on their feet.

In the sports world, they were seen as a potential aid for a BYU runner looking to break the 4-minute mile barrier, and Los Angeles State’s basketball team, which wore versions with up to six-inch-tall ripples.

The first reference to ripple soles on a football field came in 1959 when UCLA’s Billy Kilmer wore them to reduce pain from ankle injuries. Despite Kilmer’s early use, the earliest I could find in a sporting goods catalog was in 1962, when they were positioned as coaches' and officials’ shoes.

Over the next 20 years, many catalogs listed ripple shoes for coaches and game officials, and while I recall them being nearly ubiquitous among football coaches, little was written about them, at least in the newspapers. Consumer advertisements for casual ripple shoes were everywhere, but their use by coaches went largely unmentioned in the press.

Ripple shoes received coverage before the 1963 NFL title game, when New York Giants coach Allie Sherman brought them as an option for players to wear in the expected icy conditions. Sherman is also mentioned in 1968 for wearing ripple shoes while giving a pre-game speech. A 1969 article profiling NFL officials noted that the league supplied game officials with all their gear except their shoes. As the author noted:

The officials have to provide their own shoes, usually the ripple sole variety.

Hand, Jack, ‘Weatherman Is Key Figure In NFL Title Game, Newark Advocate, December 28, 1963.

Another spate of press coverage came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when players wore ripple shoes for games played on the new artificial-turf fields. That idea was novel enough in 1971 that West Virginia’s Bobby Bowden had his team try them after seeing the Texas and Arkansas backs wearing them during a televised game.

Although some players wore ripple shoes, the only listings in my catalogs are for shoes intended for coaches and officials, so I have some apparent gaps in my collection.

Although catalog images of coaching shoes are great, I wanted to find game-action images of famous coaches wearing ripple sole shoes. That required some digging, but eventually, I found a picture of Jackie Sherrill during his coordinating days at Iowa State wearing a pair of Riddell ripple-sole shoes.

Still, I was sure there were others, and the search led to Tom Landry, who, like Sherrill, favored Riddell’s ripple-sole coaching shoes. After additional searching, I found this picture of ol’ Tom taking an extra-long stride in those magical shoes.

While that picture shows the real, live Landry wearing ripple shoes, the pièce de résistance is the statue of Landry that stands outside AT&T Stadium in Dallas today.

Check out the close-up of ol’ Tom’s kicks as he stands forever on the sidelines, knowing his comfortable ripple-sole shoes will keep him there longer than all the other neighborhood statues.

I feel better now, knowing that ripple-sole shoes have found a place in the pantheon of American football, and I believe that by documenting this fact in a Tidbit, I have once again fulfilled my fatherly duties.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the 1969 college football season, when they celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Rutgers-Princeton games. The NCAA made various plans to celebrate the occasion, including wearing helmet stickers.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Laurie spent the summer of 1893 in San Francisco tutoring the San Francisco Athletic Club on the latest in Eastern football, where he was willing to coach six days per week but refused to do so on the Sabbath. He left San Francisco around August 20, heading to Chicago, where he would meet the West Point cadets near the end of their two-week encampment at the World’s Fair, the farthest west the Corps of Cadets had ever ventured.

America was beginning to flex its muscles in 1893, and what better place to flex than Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders, which hosted the World’s Columbian Exhibition or World’s Fair along the Midway.

Every gadget you could imagine was on display. The Fair debuted the Ferris Wheel, consumer products such as Juicy Fruit gum and Quaker Oats, and, most important, Frederick Pabst’s beer, which they renamed after it won the blue ribbon. (Many doubt the veracity of that story, but it’s one of those lies that is worth retelling.)

Still, if there was one gadget or innovation that dominated the 1893 World’s Fair, it was electricity, and particularly electrical lights. Westinghouse and Edison/General Electric battled over the right to light, with Westinghouse emerging victorious. Incandescent lights hung everywhere you might look; they were in the trees and lit the building interiors.

The cadets were in Chicago to be seen and to see. Encamped in front of the Government Building, they performed a daily horse mount and dress parade, and one evening were feted with a ball in the New York Building.

That was all well and good, but the key event for our purposes was their football game against the Chicago Athletic Club. You won’t find the game listed on West Point’s 1893 schedule, and while the sponsors touted it as the first football game played under the lights, at least two other artificial-light games preceded it.

Played in the cavernous Agricultural Building or Stock Pavilion, the cadets faced a formidable foe.

The Chicago Athletic Club team was filled with Eastern stars and a few Midwesterners, including.

• Heffelfinger, Yale

• Ames and Donnelly, Princeton

• Alward, Stickney, Harding, and Remington, Harvard

• Camp, Penn

• Heywork, local to Chicago

• Malley, Michigan

• Sanger, Wisconsin

Fans of various college teams entered the pavilion early, announcing themselves with their college yells. Then, the Corps of Cadets marched in, 300 strong in those days. Finally, the teams entered the building and spent a few minutes warming up before starting the game of 20-minute halves.

The cadets held their own, sort of. Chicago planned to run the ball up the gut, and their plan worked. A punt, followed by a West Point fumble deep in their territory, led to a safety and Chicago’s first two points. Later in the half, Chicago’s Hamilton scored, and Butterworth’s kick made it 8-0.

Showing once again that truth can be stranger than fiction, West Point’s coach, Laurie Bliss, entered the game in the second half. While coaches playing with college teams was not unheard of at the time, Bliss entered the game at left halfback for Chicago AC, not Army. By scoring the only touchdown of the second half on a 1-yard run, Bliss’ score had to be one of the few times a coach scored a touchdown on his own team, or, at least, his soon-to-be team.

Besides the touchdown, a few moments of fisticuffs highlighted the remainder of the second half, though everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves otherwise.

The Chicago Athletic Club went on to an 8-0 season, including the Army game, while Army finished the season at 4-5, excluding the Chicago AC game. Chicago AC stopped play after the 1898 season, while Army’s caissons continued rolling along, playing in Chicago again when they met Navy at Soldier Field in 1926.

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While “coaching tree” appeared here and there in the late 1930s and 1940s, it referred to the population of coaches, with schools choosing a coach as they might pick an apple from a tree. Later, it came to mean the succession of coaches at a particular job, often when none had been particularly successful.

The current meaning of "coaching tree” did not emerge until a few decades ago, in part because the football world differed early on. The terms “coach” and “coacher” did not arrive in America until the late 1880s. Also, the dominant Eastern schools followed the graduate coaching model, in which the previous year’s captain coached the team the following season, working jointly with the current captain and assisted by former players who volunteered for a week or two each season. As a result, people associated coaching philosophies and tactics with schools, such as the Princeton and Yale systems.

Professional coaches, as we know them, became the norm by WWI and changed the dynamic, so styles increasingly were tied to coaches rather than schools. Even then, many coaches worked alone, without formal assistants, so most of the branching came through former players rather than assistants.

By the 1910s, football’s dominant offenses were the Notre Dame Box and the Single and Double Wings, which were associated with Knute Rockne and Pop Warner. However, Rockne learned the offense from Jesse Harper, who had played for Stagg at Chicago. Rather than being described as part of coaching trees, players who became coaches were often described as pupils, disciples, or proteges of their college coach.

The current meaning of "coaching tree" dates to the 1980s. Johnny Major spoke of Bear Bryant’s coaching tree in 1982, and there were a few references to Don Coryell’s coaching tree the next few years. A solid profile of Tom Landry’s tree came in 1986, and Sam Wyche commented on being part of Bill Walsh’s tree before the two faced off in the 1989 Super Bowl, but the term’s usage did not explode until the 2000s.

Anyway, despite not being called coaching trees at the time, let’s look at a handful of old-growth coaching trees.

Amos Alonzo Stagg

Stagg, who played at Yale, became the first year-round professional coach when he accepted a faculty position at the new University of Chicago. His tree includes:

• Jesse Harper: who coached Rockne and Gus Dorais (UDetroit, Detroit Lions) during their senior year at Notre Dame

• Hugo Bezdek: who coached the Mare Island Marines and Penn State in the Rose Bowl

• Walter Steffen: long-time Carnegie Tech coach and one of the few to twice beat Rockne’s Notre Dame boys

• Pat Page: Butler and Indiana coach

• Fritz Crisler: Minnesota, Princeton, and Michigan coach who brought Michigan their silly helmets, pioneered two-platoon football, and won three national titles

Fielding Yost

Yost coached Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas, and Stanford before arriving in Ann Arbor, where he won six national titles. His branches included:

• Bennie Owen: Long-time Oklahoma coach and forward pass innovator

• Dan McGugin: Long-time Vanderbilt coach

• Ray Morrison: Played for McGugin and enjoyed a 35-year career, primarily at SMU, Vandy, and Temple

• George Little: Coached Michigan and Wisconsin. Long-time Rutgers AD

• Harry Kipke: Won two national titles at Michigan. His coaching tree includes former college coach Gerald Ford.

Pop Warner

Warner coached eight programs, though his Carlisle, Pitt, and Stanford tenures stand out, including 4 national titles

• Albert Exendine: 25-year coach from Otterbein to Oklahoma State

• Lone Star Dietz: Coach Washington State and the Mare Island Marines in the Rose Bowl

• Gus Welch: Coached Washington State, Virginia, and others in a 20-year career

• Andy Kerr: Coached Stanford, then spent years at Colgate and the East team in the annual Shrine game

• Jock Sutherland: Coached Lafayette, Pitt, and two NFL teams

• Tiny Thornhill: Assisted Warner at Stanford before taking over the program upon Warner’s departure

Knute Rockne

Rockne’s former players became a diaspora that spread across the country, holding coaching jobs large and small. Some of the larger branches include:

• Jim Crowley: Coached Georgia, Michigan State, and Fordham, where Lombardi played for him

• Frank Thomas: Won two national titles at Alabama, where he coached Bear Bryant

• Hunk Anderson: Took over at Notre Dame following Rockne’s death, then headed NC State and the WWII Chicago Bears, winning the 1943 title.

• Frank Leahy: Coached Boston College before winning four national titles at Notre Dame

• Elmer Layden: Coached Duquesne and Notre Dame before becoming the NFL’s first commissioner

• Slip Madigan: Spent 20 years at St. Mary’s and a few more at Iowa

• Buck Shaw: Coached Nevada, Santa Clara, Air Force, and spent 10 years with the 49ers and Eagles.

• Harry Stuhldreher: Spent 10+ years each at Villanova and Wisconsin

• Adam Walsh: Coached Santa Clara and Bowdoin. Won the 1945 NFL title with the Cleveland Rams

Most of the coaches mentioned in the old-growth section played for the coach. Once full-time football assistants appeared in the 1950s, the number of connections exploded as assistants moved around, working for a given coach for a year or two, or even a decade.

Given the many connections, we can trace the lineage from Stagg to today’s top college coaches, particularly Nick Saban and his assistants:

Stagg » Harper » Rockne » Frank Thomas » Bear Bryant » Paul Dietzel (assisted Bryant at Kentucky) » Bill Peterson (assisted Dietzel at LSU) » Don James (assisted Peterson at FSU) » Nick Saban (played for James at Kent State).

While we can trace Nick Saban’s connection to Stagg, it’s rather tenuous, and it is a challenge to identify a specific philosophy or approach that carried through that long line. In addition, the football world has changed, and already-excellent coaches have chosen to work with Saban in a finishing-school environment, allowing him to surround himself with outstanding assistants. As an example, all four 2026 College Football Playoff semifinal coaches — Curt Cignetti, Dan Lanning, Mario Cristobal, and Pete Golding — were Alabama assistants under Saban.

So, the explosive growth of coaching trees in recent decades allows us to trace connections, but branching more than once or twice puts us out on rather weak limbs. As with the transitive property, head-to-head outcomes are worth examining, but more distant relationships generally hold little meaning.

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Similar incorrect or incomplete information concerns the evolution of the coin flip process over the last 150 years. The Pro Football Hall of Fame states that team captains handled the coin toss from 1892 to 1920, but this is likely because they trusted Rules Committee member and pre-eminent rules historian, Dave Nelson, whose 1991 Anatomy of a Game stated that the captains handled the coin flip until 1921. That turns out not to be true, though it was an easy mistake to make, as you will see.

When football began with the IFA slightly modifying rugby’s 1876 rules, the 39th rule called for the captains to toss to choose between goals and the kickoff.

The captains handled the coin flip themselves, though it's not clear who flipped the coin and called heads or tails. The referee and umpires were not involved in the process. However, it seems fair to assume there were problems with the process, since the 1884 rules had the new judges handle the coin flip. The judge positions soon disappeared, and by 1888, the rules had the captains tossing up once again.

Somewhere in that timeframe, some referees began handling the coin toss in a pre-game gathering with the captains. Their meeting also covered ground rules, the length of each half, and other game adjustments. The first mention I’ve found of a referee handling the coin toss came in the 1891 UNC-Duke game, when Duke was known as Trinity.

Likewise, before the 1893 Purdue-DePauw game, they had to flip twice:

The referee tossed a silver dollar into the air, but it alighted on the edge in the soft mud and another trial was made.

‘’Rah For Purdue, Indiana State Sentinel, December 6, 1893.

Mentions of the referee flipping the coin become more frequent after that, but as a mundane part of the game, who flipped off whom went unmentioned in most game reports, though it appears in images here and there.

Still, by 1909, a primer on the game described the referee handling the coin toss and confirming the game’s length as being standard parts of the process, even though the rules still stated that the captains tossed a coin pre-game.

Dave Nelson and the Pro Football HOF might have looked at the old rule books and reasonably concluded that the behavioral change occurred when the rule changed in 1921:

While the rule clearly changed in 1921, the NCAA rule books of the era opened with a description of the year’s most important rule changes, providing background on why various rules were altered. The 1921 explanation notes that the rule change codified an existing practice rather than introduced a new one. As shown in newspaper articles, the passage confirms that referees had been flipping the coin by custom for some time, despite the written rule.

Football has had many instances in which the rules lagged behind the game as played. The acceptance of blocking, players wearing numbered jerseys, face masks, and short pants are other examples of the rules following the behavior. So, it is not out of the norm for the referee's practice of handling the coin to precede its inclusion in the rules.

Perhaps more interesting is another point made in the Pro Football Hall of Fame timeline: the NFL moved the coin toss from 30 minutes before the game to 3 minutes in 1976. The NCAA made that move in 1952, at which point the rule book described the toss up as a ceremony. That tells us that a once-mundane element of the pre-game became a rite watched by those in the stadium and watching on television. Who among us has not cheered when the referee signaled that our team won the toss or had a different reaction when the flip went in the other team’s favor? And, more than a few have bet money on which team wins the toss, but that is a topic for another day.

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The Dassler brothers began making athletic shoes in Germany in the 1920s. Their business was successful, but the brothers feuded, eventually leading them to split it into separate companies after WWII. Rudolph Dassler’s portion became Ruda, then Puma, while Adolf “Adi” Dassler formed adidas.

By the 1960s, both companies had distinct logos on the sides of their shoes and promoted their brands by paying Olympic athletes and soccer players to wear shoes bearing those logos. Puma even paid Pelé to stop and tie his shoes immediately before the 1970 World Cup started, leading millions to see him on TV tying his Puma-branded shoe.

American brands began adopting the Dassler brothers’ strategy of putting logos on their shoes and paying influencers to wear them. There was a bit of a scandal when some American amateur athletes were paid to wear specific shoes for the 1968 Olympics. Later, another scandal arose when we learned that college basketball coaches were paid to have their teams wear a particular shoe brand. Once scandalous payments are now the norm, and I don’t need to tell you how brands have invaded every stitch of clothing we own.

But, to bring the discussion back to Futball Americano, let’s take a look at a few pages from Wilson’s 1971 catalog, which shows Wilson was a little late to the branding game. According to Wilson’s website, they only make tennis shoes today, while their only gridiron products are footballs. Back in 1971, they sold footballs, helmets, shoulder pads, hip pads, rib pads, jerseys, pants, stockings, dummies, sideline gear, and other items listed in 60+ pages of their 122-page catalog. Of those products, only the footballs and shoulder pads prominently displayed the Wilson W logo. The logo on the shoulder pads would have been covered by the jersey anyway.

What about Wilson’s shoes? A review of the four pages displaying shoes reveals that Wilson did not place the W logo on the outside of their shoes. Worse, they appear to have misread the room by placing varying white stripe patterns along the sides of some all-black shoes. Nothing consistent. Nothing screamed Wilson.

Wilson sold all-black shoes for years, but a few striping patterns appeared on some shoes by 1967. For Wilson, the stripes appear to have been mere decorations rather than branding elements. For example, the fancy molded-bottom, three-striped shoe below does not scream Wilson; instead, it looks like an adidas shoe.

The next page shows four shoes: two with a three-stripe triangular pattern, and one with gorgeous white padding at the top. The other two are plain Jane.

The third page of shoes features two- and three-striped models, including a stunning three-striped high-top. Both high-top models include a magical white stripe atop the boot.

Finally, their less expensive and specialty shoes on the fourth page include only two-striped models, though the kicking shoe features a white Strap-Lock. Notably, Wilson sold the kicking shoe only for the right-footed among us, so all those left-footed, straight-ahead kickers could either buy another brand or learn to kick soccer-style, like Pelé.

The 1971 Wilson catalog is the most recent Wilson catalog I own, but a newspaper archive search suggests Wilson used varying striping patterns until they exited the football shoe business in the 1980s.

Manufacturer brand logos are now strewn across uniforms, while decorations are seen on many shoes, Oregon’s uniforms, and those who model themselves after the Ducks. We once lived in a simpler world with fewer logos, and if you long for those simpler times, feel free to blame soccer and the World Cup for ripping those days out of your hands, and feet.

And, Happy Canada Day, to my northerly-enhanced subscribers.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the story of the Minnesota Gophers who faced a hotel fire on their way to play Washington in 1936. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured and they continued on to Seattle soon thereafter.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Football players began protecting their schnozzes with nose guards in 1892. Face masks as we know them today were a 1930s development used by players with broken noses and those who wore glasses. Early face masks covered the eyes and nose; those extending to the chin were a 1960s thing.

As important as the introduction of face masks was in this story, the development of cameras with shutter speeds capable of capturing game-action images was equally important. Those cameras allowed college yearbooks and the Spalding Guides of the 1940s and 1950s to include images of face-grabbing by offensive and defensive players.

Below are a few examples:

Facemasking became illegal in 1957, and although the NCAA did not require face masks until 1993, everyone still wore them. Without dramatic changes to football’s rules, we’ll not see further examples of face grabbing soon.

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The idea that teams might offer food and shelter to visiting teams might seem odd. However, schools in smaller communities did not, and still do not necessarily have nearby hotels capable of housing traveling football parties. (I was involved with a Division I program in a small town in the 1980s, and some visiting teams slept on cots in the old gymnasium the night before the game. They also used the school’s training table facilities.)

I covered the hosting of opponents for meals, specifically, shared meals or purity banquets in the past, so that I won’t take that topic further here.

Instead, let’s examine the custom of allowing visiting teams to practice on the game field the day before the contest. That does not seem to have been a common practice, past or present, but it occurred at times, especially in the past, when transportation systems were less advanced.

In the old days, the absence of airplanes and buses meant teams primarily traveled by train, and the transportation system’s limitations were one reason teams mostly played teams from the same or neighboring states. It’s also the reason most games started at 2:30 in the afternoon. The 2:30 start time allowed teams and fans to travel to the game by train, play a two-hour game, and return home by train that evening.

Still, some teams traveling to or from remote locations could not depart on the morning of the game and arrive in time, and some coaches might have preferred to arrive the day before so their players could have a relaxing trip and be well-rested for the game. In fact, some wanted to arrive early enough on Friday to practice on the game field so the team could become familiar with the surroundings and punters could test the prevailing winds.

That all leads to the obvious question: who originated the practice of giving the visiting team access to the game field the day before the game? As with many football practices, the team or person credited with originating a custom was often not the true originator.

For example, below is coverage of Nebraska, which gave the Pop Warner-coached Carlisle team the courtesy of practicing on Nebraska’s field the day before they played in 1908. It was the first time Nebraska followed this custom, which the reporter credited to Yale for originating earlier that year. But did they? No, they did not.

Instead, the custom appears to have originated at Penn’s Franklin Field in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Penn hosted Cornell. From 1893 to 1960, Cornell ended its season by playing at Penn on Thanksgiving Day. It was a big deal. While our buddy Pop Warner coached Cornell in 1897 and 1898, before returning from 1904 to 1907, Cornell’s coach from 1899 through 1901 was Percy Haughton, who gained fame by coaching Harvard to a handful of national championships.

It was under Haughton’s watchful eye that Cornell traveled to Philadelphia in time to practice at Franklin Field on Thanksgiving Wednesday in 1899. So, Yale was not the first to extend the courtesy. Penn was.

For whatever reason, Cornell did not practice at Franklin Field the day before the game in 1900. Instead, they held signal practice in the hotel ballroom, but in 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1904, they held practice at Franklin Field, with Warner returning to Ithaca in the last year of the sequence.

In 1901, Penn allowed Harvard to practice at Franklin Field, so the Quakers were gracious hosts to non-Cornellians as well.

The gracious host custom does not appear to have taken hold in the Midwest during that era, though the purity banquets had their day later that decade. Visiting teams practicing on the game field became more common in the 1910s, perhaps because intersectional games grew more frequent, with Yale practicing at Harvard Stadium and Harvard at Princeton on the eve of their games.

Whether budgets expanded or coaching philosophies changed, the trend continued, and the 1920s saw teams arriving the day before and practicing on the game field more often.

Nevertheless, buses and airplanes made it far easier to practice at home the day before the game and still arrive at the destination, so practicing on the game field the day before games seems to have faded away, except for games played at more distant locales and bowl games. Instead, teams appear to have arrived at the stadium earlier on game day to allow players to walk around, soak up the atmosphere, test the turf, and otherwise acclimate to their new surroundings.

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• Section I - Rules Used As Definitions

• Section II: Rules Preliminary to the Game

• Section III: Rules Bearing Directly on the Play

• Referee’s Duties & Rules Interpretations

Today’s article finishes the Interpretation of Rules section of the rule book.

The interpretation of Rule 14 is interesting, though it’s a bit unclear to me. The rule addresses when the ball goes into touch (aka out of bounds) and states that only the ball and the foot constitute being out of bounds, not the hand. Why they had such a rule is anyone’s guess. The interpretation goes on to say that when a ball hits a spectator standing out of bounds, it must be brought back in from touch (following the prescribed procedures). Since the ball remained live when out of bounds and could be recovered by either team, I assume this interpretation precluded spectators from interfering with play or helping one team or another recover the ball.

The interpretation of Rule 15 foreshadows a key turning point in American football. In a scrimmage, offensive players could stand in place with extended, but non-interlocking arms to “block” defenders. By rule, they could not yet run in advance of the ball carrier, so they could not “block” as we think of it today. On the other hand, the rules also did not allow touching opponents who did not have the ball -a rule that applied to the offense and defense- so defenders had to avoid the extended arms of offensive players. They could not go through the blockers and had to go around them.

As active warding/interfering/blocking became accepted over the next few years, the football rule makers made a tradeoff: defensive players could freely use their arms and push through offensive players, while the offense was restricted from using their hands when blocking until the 1970s.

I have often wondered about football’s early toss up or coin flip procedures. We take it for granted that the referee tosses the coin, but the rules of 1876 through 1883 had the captains flipped the coin. Yet, the interpretation of Rule 24 in 1884 says the judges flip the coin. I don’t have the 1885 through 1887 rule books, but by 1888, the captains regained flipping responsibility. The 1895 rule book indicates the captains were to toss up, though an article covering that year’s Penn-Harvard game tells us the referee performed the coin toss, so perhaps the pre-game custom was transitioning at the time.

In football’s early days, safeties were known as safety touchdowns (they safely touched the ball down in goal and then kicked out) and affected scoring only in unusual situations. To address the block game issue, safeties became worth one point for the other team in 1883 and two points in 1884.

As discussed in the third article in this series, there were five ways to bring the ball back onto the playing field from out of bounds. One allowed the team in possession to walk the ball back onto the field up to 15 yards before putting it down for a scrimmage play. The interpretation of Rule 31 tells us that the player bringing the ball in had first to declare how far he would walk in, presumably to eliminate the potential for trick plays in which he snapped the ball while walking it in. While four of the five processes for bringing the ball onto the field fell away over time, the notification and walk-in process remained in football until the arrival of hash marks in 1933.

That’s it for the contents of the 1884 rule book, but we cannot leave the topic without showing the Wright & Ditson ad on page 27. The obvious item to point out is the wonderfully proportioned melon ball.

Further down the ad, Wright & Ditson touts their uniforms, which they could provide at the shortest notice. Despite being a prominent athletic supplier, Wright & Ditson did not yet stock uniforms. Uniforms were custom-made, so having an experienced cutter was a selling point to customers in 1884.

To wrap up this series, you can download a copy of Camp, Walter (Ed.), Foot-Ball Rules and Referees’ Book. American Intercollegiate Association. Boston: Wright & Ditson, 1884. Clicking the link takes you to another page with a downloadable version of the full rule book as provided by the Library of Congress.

Thanks once again to those who funded the scanning of the 1884 rule book by the Library of Congress!

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